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HOUSTON'S VOTERS HEAR FROM GIULIANI

New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani injected himself into the politics of a city halfway across the nation on Wednesday, lambasting Houston's front-running mayoral candidate, Lee P. Brown, a former New York City Police Commissioner, for his handling of racial violence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, six years ago.

Just days before Saturday's run-off election here, Mr. Giuliani told reporters in Houston that Mr. Brown's two-year tenure in New York ''was a very bad time for the city'' and that the response of the police force under Mr. Brown to the violence in Crown Heights was ''a negative lesson on how we do police work in New York.''

Mr. Brown, a popular police chief here in Houston before he moved on to New York, finished first in voting on Nov. 4, and a poll released today showed him running nearly 10 percentage points ahead of his runoff opponent, Rob Mosbacher, a wealthy local businessman.

Mr. Mosbacher has repeatedly sought to make the Crown Heights violence an issue in the mayoral campaign and his aides urged Mr. Giuliani to air his concerns, according to the Mayor's aides. Up to now, Mr. Brown has been able to parry the issue, in part by angrily suggesting that discussion of racial clashes between blacks and Orthodox Jews in New York might disturb what he has called ''the sacred ground'' of black-Jewish relations in Houston.

In a debate on Monday night, Mr. Brown said the police force he commanded had actually done exemplary work during the Crown Heights violence, which started when a car in a procession of Hasidic Jews struck and killed a young black boy and soon led to a racial clash in which a Hasidic scholar was killed.

''We avoided, with the action we took, a Los Angeles-type riot,'' Mr. Brown said, arguing during the debate that the clashes, even though they led to the injuries of nearly 200 residents and police officers and property damage across several blocks, could have been much worse.

The Houston Chronicle, saying that Mr. Giuliani had sought out Houston reporters, said in an article today that the Mayor had read Mr. Brown's quotes in an article about the Houston mayoral race in The New York Times on Wednesday and believed them to be inaccurate.

''I use the Crown Heights riot -- I actually give one-hour lectures on it -- as the basis for what you shouldn't do,'' Mr. Giuliani told The Chronicle.

Two years after the violence, Mr. Giuliani unseated Mayor David N. Dinkins, who had appointed Mr. Brown, after repeatedly attacking his handling of the Crown Heights disturbances. Mr. Giuliani ran that year with strong support in the Jewish community. Many Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn had said that the city's response had been inadequate. An inquiry ordered by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo faulted the Police Department for its failure to respond effectively to the violence, criticizing Mr. Brown for a vacuum of leadership.

Mr. Brown dismissed Mr. Giuliani's comments as politically motivated and irrelevant to Houston voters. ''Divide-and-conquer politics may work for Rudy Giuliani and New York City but won't work for Rob Mosbacher here in Houston,'' he said in a statement.

''In his second effort to defeat David Dinkins he had every reason to distort the facts, divide the city and politicize the issue,'' he added. ''Now he wants to do it again, in his ongoing campaign to be a player in national Republican politics.''

Whether Mr. Giuliani's comments will have any effect remains to be seen. Some analysts suggested today that it could well motivate more white voters to turn out to vote for Mr. Mosbacher.

It is possible Mr. Giuliani's attempts to help Mr. Mosbacher's campaign could backfire by energizing black voters. It also may simply irritate Houston voters in general as unwelcome meddling by a New Yorker.

The election here is nonpartisan, with no primaries, but Mr. Brown is a Democrat, and Mr. Mosbacher, like Mr. Giuliani, is a Republican. Mr. Giuliani, who won re-election in November, received at least $22,000 from Mosbacher family members and an official in the family's energy company. He received $7,700 in donations -- the maximum -- from Georgette Mosbacher, the estranged wife of Mr. Mosbacher's father, Robert. He also received $7,250 from Clinton I. Smullyan, the president of Mosbacher properties, and $7,000 from Barbara S. Mosbacher, Mr. Mosbacher's aunt, campaign finance records show.

Still other analysts said that Mr. Giuliani's comments about Crown Heights may simply not resonate with Houstonians at all, no matter how it played out in New York.

''This one is a complicated story,'' said Bob Stein, a political scientist at Rice University here. ''People may be asking, 'where is Crown Heights? Who are these people? What do they have to do with the election in Houston?' ''

The Chronicle today described Mr. Giuliani as having ''sought out Houston reporters'' and as having ''worked with'' Mr. Mosbacher's staff to arrange the interviews.

But Randy Levine, a deputy mayor, said that Mr. Mosbacher's staff had contacted him to see if the Mayor Giuliani would respond to Mr. Brown's descriptions of Crown Heights, and that Mr. Giuliani had simply agreed, responding later in the day to phone calls placed to him.

Mr. Levine also said that Mayor Giuliani has been irritated to hear that Mr. Brown was taking some credit for the drop in crime in New York City over the past several years. In 1990 and 1991, when Mr. Brown came to New York to serve as Police Commissioner, murders were at an all-time high in the city.

But Mr. Brown, who returned to Houston because his wife was dying from cancer, said the overall crime rate began dropping during his tenure and that the later drops should be traced in part to his policies.

Mr. Giuliani told The Chronicle that Mr. Brown had been ineffective as Police Commissioner, although the article also quoted Mr. Giuliani as saying that he was ''a very nice man -- I know him somewhat.''